


And Your Touch Stains My Soul

by Kakushigo



Category: Stargate Atlantis
Genre: And then Atlantis happened, Gen, M/M, Rodney McKay's Only Friend was a Ph.D, Soulmark AU, introspective piece about Rodney Mckay, of a variety
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-13
Updated: 2020-08-13
Packaged: 2021-03-05 22:54:44
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,359
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25873189
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kakushigo/pseuds/Kakushigo
Summary: Soulmarks only appear when someone loves you.  Rodney McKay has contented himself with the scarred love his parents left him and the faded marks of his sister.  Then he goes to Atlantis, and color blooms.
Relationships: Rodney McKay/John Sheppard
Comments: 8
Kudos: 142





	And Your Touch Stains My Soul

**Author's Note:**

> This has been sitting in my gdocs for ages. I wanted to do something longer, but I re-read it and decided that you know what? It did work as is.

Soumate marks are a bit of a misnomer; they’re more like tattoos than anything. The first lines of them appear when you make your first vow of love and the canvas keeps filling as long as you keep loving. The only thing that can make these colorful murals fade is death. Infidelity just tends to make things complicated, with another mark appearing, perhaps even eclipsing the original. Polygamy, when practiced right, tends to make vast murals of skin stretching from person to person in a gorgeous display of color. Those with a blind mate tend to have a bit of texture to their marks and those with color blind mates find the colors their love cannot see not appearing on their skin. All textbook stuff. Most people’s first marks are platonic: a mother, father, brother, or sister’s love is often a good start.

Rodney’s skin isn’t completely blank, despite what quite a few pointed comments made just inside his hearing range have implied. His mother’s mark, as small as it is, is an ugly scar along his left shoulder, and Jeannie’s (faded though it is), still scrawls idly across his feet with the unfettered love of a little sister. It’s really the only way he knows she hasn’t died, since he cut all ties when she took love of parenthood and mediocrity over being the genius sibling duo who could have taken the world by storm. He saw, with his own eyes, the brilliant and bold tapestry Jeannie’s love for her simple man of a English professor husband had made and he’d never wanted to mar that with his no-nonsense plain black lines. Jeannie’s own marks from him seemed...plain in comparison to what Kaleb could give Jeannie, so he’d just devoted himself to his work and waited until Jeannie’s letters stopped coming. He told himself that the fading of their once strong marks was better for both of them. It’d leave more room for the eventual gaggle of marks she’d get from hers and Kaleb’s children, not to mention Kaleb’s own.

So Rodney’s two marks are nothing to brag about. They’re relatively small and one is scarred with death. He’s fine with it, he tells himself even as he signs away his chance to ever win a Nobel to a gag order and goes to work for the American military of all things. What has the world come to?

It’s all worth it for Atlantis. All the mistakes he’s made along the way… It’s a shame that intangible and non-sentient ideas can’t give marks (nor cats for that matter, no matter how many people post on reddit that their cat/dog/fish/raccoon gave them a mark). Rodney always likes to imagine he’d have quite the impressive set of marks, if only his work could love him back. He wouldn’t have room on his skin for anything else. Science is his first love, but hey, Atlantis can be his second. They only have bits of data and no one has figured out the gate yet, but Rodney is sure they will, given time. He complains about Antarctica, but he doesn’t really mind. He’s been in worse places in pursuit of things that aren’t nearly as worthy. And they eat MRE’s a lot, which Rodney freely admits are some of the few meals he finds palatable. Mostly because they don’t remind him, in any way, of his childhood meals.

Then John Sheppard blows in. Somewhat literally, considering the little incident with the drone, and makes the whole place go crazy. Which sadly isn’t an exaggeration, considering the man has the strongest gene Rodney has ever seen outside of General O’Neil. It doesn’t make Rodney jealous. At all. Nor does the scrawling of colors along John’s hands. They’re vibrant still, unfaded by distance or death and of course this madman has something holding him to Earth which means they’ll be stuck in Atlantis without a personal light switch because O’Neil isn’t coming either. Rodney would pout, if it wasn’t so unbecoming. So instead he sends off a couple strongly worded emails to idiots.

And then the madman joins them. Rodney isn’t sure what to think of John’s stained hands, though at least Atlantis’ nightlight had the sense to put on gloves before he walked through the event horizon. His colorful hands might distract hapless scientists who had important work to do. Not Rodney though, because he didn’t care about things like that. Besides, he was too busy saving the city because the military thought it was a fine idea to go trapezing through it and completely wasting the precious energy of the last ZPM that Atlantis had. Idiots.

He’s surprised when he takes off his shirt one day to see a new mark. It’s small still, a slowly darkening blue line right under his pectoral muscles. He traces the faint line with his fingers, thinking back over the day. No one had told him that they loved him, even jokingly, and “I love you” is one of the most common catalysts for a mark to appear. There’s pulp novel after pulp novel about knowing someone is “the one” just because you can feel the mark start to take shape on your skin after you hear that person you’ve been lusting for say the magic words. Rodney puts zero stock in anything like that. There’s not an exact science to the marks, which makes them a soft science and not one of Rodney’s interests, but even he knows that a mark can be platonic or romantic and you can’t feel the damn things form at all. 

It’s only been a couple days since they’ve gotten to Atlantis and Rodney can’t imagine who it might be. Hell, maybe Atlantis is a little bit more aware then they’ve been thinking. And since it’s appearing on his skin, that means Rodney reciprocates. There’s no one on this expedition he cares that much about, is there? His brain flashes to messy hair, ridiculous shades, and color stained hands. Rodney laughs to himself, shaking his head. There’s no way John Sheppard of all people is putting a mark on Rodney, even if the man had been somewhat concerned when his personal shield had failed.

The mural, and Rodney can now safely call it a mural, is growing. He’s pretty sure it’s going to be a sunset, over Atlantis’ waters. The view from the east pier, to be exactly. And he knows who it is for, due to the other pictures that have slowly taken over his skin. The turtle is Carson’s. Teyla’s is the masks (they’re still being colored in, so Rodney doesn’t know what they’re masks of yet), Ford’s is a violin, and Radek’s was the scientific formula for coffee. It’s weird having friends. It’s weird having colorful skin. Rodney had managed to avoid it for 30 years, pretty much, and here he is. The only one of his he’s seen is Teyla’s, she’d had a spidery looking black tree climbing over her left shoulder blade, which Rodney had known meant they were marked. It was nice, knowing someone cared about him. It only took a whole other galaxy to get what most people get by the time they’re 20. 

Rodney traces the tattoo on John’s shoulder. There’s something underneath it, that he can’t see quite clearly, but he doesn’t ask. Ink tattoos, like John’s, are pretty common for a few reasons. Either someone loves someone who can’t love them back, so they get a tattoo to commemorate it. It’s very common to those who have sworn themselves to duty, like military men. It’s also common to do to a mark where the other committed infidelity. Especially if the colors didn’t fade and you wanted to obscure it. Temporary tattoos were also used for legal and illegal reasons that Rodney probably had read too much about on a sleepless night somewhere along the way. 

John moved, pulling his shoulder away from Rodney’s touch and yet snuggling closer. He can take a hint. He closes his eyes and tries to go to sleep, urged to dreamland by the steady sound of the ocean all around them. 

**Author's Note:**

> Come talk to me on [tumblr](https://kakushigo.tumblr.com) or [twitter!](https://twitter.com/Kakushigo1)


End file.
